Audio only:
Joe examines St. Irenaeus’ claim that Jesus was around 50 years old when he died, how Protestants use this to try to discredit tradition, and how Catholics should respond.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And one of the arguments you’ll sometimes hear against tradition is that we can’t trust that the church fathers got tradition right. And there’s actually one particular moment that gets used a lot as an example to try to prove that point, that Saint Irenaeus allegedly got Jesus’ age wrong. The Bible answerman, Hank Hanigraf, some of you may be familiar with him, he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy back in 2017. And one of the arguments he made for why he left evangelicalism for orthodoxy was because he started to take church history and the church fathers more seriously. And even though they’re not infallible, they’re still very important for shaping how we think about theology and the practices of the church. And I want you to listen to how James White responds to that argument.
CLIP:
And church history is very, very important because the practices of the early Christian church have been passed down to us by men like Saint Ignatius or Polycarp or Iranaeus or Athanasius. Now men are not infallible.
CLIP:
Okay. So when Iranaeus passes down to us the apostolic tradition that Jesus was more than 50 years old when he died, do we believe that? Does Hank believe that? Because I can give you the reference. And he claimed the apostles passed it down. So we believe that, right?
Joe:
Kevin Fernandez of since AD33 pointed out on Twitter that the 16th century Lutheran reformer, Martin Kimnist, made very much the same argument in his examination of the Council of Trent, claiming that it shows how even good men in the church have been deceived by placing excessive confidence in unwritten traditions. When I told my producer, Metal Mike, that I wanted to make an episode responding to that argument, he was worried that it’d be too obscure. After all, who is familiar with this argument other than maybe James White and anyone who reads Martin Kimnis? I’m telling it, Joe, you can’t do it. After all, who’s going to be familiar with this argument other than James White and people who’ve read Martin Kimnis? But right after he said that, literally the very next day, Founders Ministries released a video called The Dangers of Roman Catholicism in which Dr.
Christopher Cleveland makes this argument.
CLIP:
I spoke with one student. I never taught him in a class or anything, but there’s one of the church fathers, and I’m drawing a blank on which one it was, who claims that Jesus was 50 years old when he died. And it’s absurd. You can’t really read the Bible and come up with that. But this student had read this church father and he was so insistent. Jesus was 50 when he was crucified. And I mean, throws all of the timelines of the gospels out of whack. It doesn’t make any sense.
Joe:
So there you go, Mike. Clearly there are still Protestants making this argument 500 years later. And it’s easy to see why. At first glance, it really does seem like Urenaeus is citing to false information about Jesus and claiming that this false information is apostolic tradition. I mean, he argues that Jesus died in his forties and he seems to say that this is taught both by the gospel and all the elders and that those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, affirm that John conveyed to them that information. So if you’re a Protestant like James White or these guys at founders, it looks like an excellent argument about why we should not trust tradition.
CLIP:
And so he taught that Jesus is an old man when he died. And he claimed this was taught to him by the apostles. This is an apostolic tradition. The Jewish is more than 50 years old when you did. Nobody east or west actually believes that, but that’s the earliest example of quote unquote apostolic tradition in the early church.
Joe:
But I think these Protestants maybe don’t appreciate how serious this argument is because it doesn’t just look like an argument against the reliability of apostolic tradition. If you take it seriously, it looks at least on the surface, like an argument against the reliability of Christianity itself. People like James White and these guys and founders want us to reject apostolic tradition as a reliable source of information and to rely on scripture alone. But how do we know that the four gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, for example, only those four. Well, one of the typical arguments you’ll hear is that those four were either written by apostles, Matthew and John, or those who accompanied apostles, Mark and Luke. It’s a good argument as far as it goes, but the problem is the gospels themselves are internally anonymous. The authors never introduced themselves. We don’t know Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John from the Bible.
We know that from tradition and from tradition alone. And specifically, we know it from traditions recounted by Saint Iranaeus and those who come after him. Irenaeus is the first author to name all four of the gospel authors that we have today. The great evangelical scholar, D.A. Carson, whose commentary in the gospel of John acknowledges this, but says that even if Ireneus toward the end of the second century is amongst the strongest, totally unambiguous witnesses, his personal connection with Polycarpunu John means the distance in terms of personal memories is not very great. I think Carson is right there. This is what the biblical scholar Marcus Bachmuell calls the period of living memory. In other words, Irnaus doesn’t just know about the authorship of the gospels from inside the Bible. In fact, he doesn’t know it from that at all. Rather, Irnaeus is of the generation of Christians who learned theology, learned about the message of Christianity from bishops and theologians who knew the apostles personally, and who had learned Christianity from the apostles directly.
So for instance, Iranaeus has learned from Polycarp. Polycarp learns from the Apostle John. Well, when another of Polykarp’s students becomes agnostic, Irinaeus refutes him not by quoting Bible verses to him, but by reminding him that these opinions, those presbyters who preceded us and who were conversant with the apostles did not hand down to you as an argument, in other words, from tradition. And he argues that Polycarp would have been horrified to hear Florianas’ teachings. So my point here is that if we can’t trust Iraneus, if we cannot trust the early Christians broadly to transmit the gospel correctly, that doesn’t just seem to be a big problem for Catholics. That seems to be a major problem for all Christians. But here’s the good news. The argument against Iranaeus, it’s all built on a series of half truths. Now, if you think about it, the argument people are making against Iranaeus is basically threefold.
Number one, the Bible clearly teaches that Jesus was about 33 when he died. Number two, Saint Irenaeus ignores or contradicts scripture by claiming that Jesus was instead about 50. And number three, Ironeus’s argument about Jesus’ age is rooted in a false tradition. Somebody’s just passed on bad information that he’s just repeating. Now, the problem with all three of those claims are that they’re all false, or at least they’re all half true at best. I want to start with the first one. Does the Bible actually teach us somewhere that Jesus was 33 when he died? Surprisingly, it doesn’t. Let’s see what it does say. Let’s start at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Luke 3:23 says that Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about 30 years of age. You’ll notice that we’re already off to an interesting start. Luke, even though he’s literally a contemporary of Jesus, doesn’t seem to be exactly sure of how old Jesus was at the start of his ministry, or at least he doesn’t give us a very exact date.
Well, how long does Jesus publicly teach for then? We typically think of that span of time as about three years, but as John Gavin and Angela Frank point out, that standard view is largely based just on the fact that John mentions three separate Passovers during Jesus’s public ministry. Now that certainly shows us Jesus must have been ministering for at least three years. But nowhere in scripture does it say that he taught for only three years or that he was 33 when he died or anything like that. Because remember, as John himself tells us, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book. You might think about it like this. Luke one records Jesus’ birth and his presentation in the temple. And then in Luke two, we hear about the family going up to Jerusalem for the Passover.
But that doesn’t mean they were going up that year or the next year. No, Luke is very clear when he’s talking about the Passover in Luke two. He’s talking about when Jesus is now 12 years old. Luke has literally just skipped over a decade’s worth of Passovers. Now Ireneus, it turns out, is actually well aware of the biblical evidence. So for context here, he’s arguing against gnostic heretics. And they believed that there were 30 kind of divine beings called eons. And they claim that because of these 30 Aons, Jesus waited until he was 30 to begin his public ministry. And since Jesus was proclaiming an acceptable year of the Lord, they used this to claim that Jesus’s entire public ministry was only one year long ending in the 12th month of that year. Now, these were not harmless chronological errors. Rather, it was a whole system designed to prove that everything happened when Jesus was 30 because of these alleged 30 eons.
And so in answering the Gnostics, Erenaeus points out that there are three or depending upon how one reads John five: one, perhaps even four different Passovers recorded in the Gospel of John. And since Passover we know is in the first month of the Jewish year, not the 12th, it’s clear that the Gnostic’s entire chronology is pretty obviously wrong. But Iranaeus realizes what a lot of modern Christians have missed. That the fact that John mentions, for example, the feast of Passover on John two and then in John six, that doesn’t mean that those two events are exactly one year apart. They could be many years apart. So all of that is to say Christopher Cleveland and those who make this claim are wrong in claiming that believing Jesus was in his forties would somehow throw the timelines of the gospel out of whack. You can still believe in everything in the order it’s presented.
You just have more time in between events. In fact, as we’re going to see in a moment here, there’s some evidence from tradition, ironically enough, that points to Jesus being 33, but we don’t know Jesus’s age or the length of his public ministry from scripture alone. So it’s not that Uranius is ignoring scripture or contradicting it quite the opposite. He’s conversant in it. And while part of Irinaeus’s argument, which again, we’re going to look at in a second, is on the basis of tradition. He’s also making his argument based upon an interesting biblical argument, namely this. In John chapter eight, when Jesus described seeing Abraham, the Jews responded, “You are not yet 50 years old.” And have you seen Abraham? Irenaeus points out that’s a weird thing to say to Jesus if Jesus is still in his young 30s. But it makes much more sense if he’s in his late 40s.
If you’re going to try to downplay somebody’s authority because they’re so young, you’re not going to say you’re not yet 50. If they’re 32, you’re going to say you’re barely 30 or you’re not yet 40. So when you hear Protestants claim that Ireneus got his view simply from unwritten tradition and that this is why we can’t trust tradition, it’s simply not true. Ireneus’s argument is largely drawn from scripture itself. And it’s easy to see how somebody carefully reading the New Testament would conclude that Jesus is much older than 33, as old as his late 40s. As I said, the clearest evidence we have that this isn’t the case, the clearest evidence that we have that Jesus actually did die at the age of 33, it doesn’t come from scripture. It comes from apostolic tradition. Saint Hepolitus of Rome writing about a quarter century after Ireneus tells us that Jesus was born on December 25th and died at the age of 33.
Now, without relying on tradition, I don’t know how one would determine that Ireneus’ chronology of Jesus is mistaken here. And yet his chronology is mistaken. And we can actually make a pretty good guess exactly how he made his mistake. Now here, a little bit more background is necessary. One of the arguments that Irinaeus is making in response to the gnostics is that Jesus becomes like us in every stage of our lives. This is the theology of what’s called recapitulation. Christ takes on headship within the human family by becoming one of us and restoring and redeeming us. As Hebrews two says, Christ had to be made like his brethren in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make expedition for the sins of the people. This is a really important theology that really shows why gnosticism is false and evil.
But as Irenaeus says, this means that Jesus came to save all through means of himself. All I say who through whom are born again to God, infants and children and boys and youths and old men. He therefore passed through every age, becoming an infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants. That by the way, is a good piece of evidence pointing towards infant baptism. I’m going to leave that alone for now. And he continues on with that, showing how Christ even became an old man for old men before at last he came to death itself. But Irinaeus doesn’t just claim that this is fitting, but he says that this is what’s testified to in scripture by the gospel itself as well as by all the elders. And specifically he says by those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, affirming that John conveyed to them that information.
Now, scholars today realize that he’s nodding here towards Papius in particular. He was a church father from the late first century and early second century who lived at the time of the apostles. And one of the reasons we know that’s who he’s pointing to is because later in against heresies, Irinaeus talks about what the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, related that they had heard from him. And then he quickly explains that he means those things which are born witness to in writing by Popius, the hearer of John, a companion of polycarp. So this seems to be another example of an ancient tradition, which Ironeus is drawing from Popius, who then gets it from other eyewitnesses of John. Now, unfortunately, we only have fragments of Popius’s writing today, but fortunately we do have the writings of another church father, Saint Victorinus, who also seems to be drawn from Papius.
Now in Victorinus’s work, he says that Jesus consummates his humanity in the number seven of his nativity, his infancy, his boyhood, his youth, his young manhood, his mature age, his death. That’s the original thing Papius seems to have said, or at least something very close to that. And when you hear it that way, it’s clear that that tradition is true. That’s the tradition Irenaeus is relaying here. But to make sense of where Ireneus makes a mistake, you’ve got to know two more things. First, you need to know that ancient writers love to talk in this way about the seven different stages of human life or the five different stages of the 10 different stages of human life. Christian Lace and John Struby and youth in the Roman Empire point out that we have some 50 Greek texts in 120 Latin passages that contain more or less elaborate divisions of the human life cycle.
So when Iranaeus is talking this way, or when Victor Inus or Papias are talking this way about redeeming the different stages of life, that is a way of thinking about the human person and human life that the readers at that time were primed to think about in those terms. But the second thing to realize is that despite all the talk from all those different sources on the different ages and stages of life, there was somehow no actual agreed upon system. For example, the second century rhetoric, Julius Pollocks divides a man’s life into seven stages of seven years of peace. After 49, you’re dead, man. Varo divides the lifespan up into five series of 15 years. So in Varo’s system, your final stage of life doesn’t even begin until you turn 60. Well, after you’re dead in Pollock’s system. Solan lets you live even five years longer.
He divides your life up into 10 stages of seven years. Well, the problem is these authors are often using the same names for different stages of life, but they mean different things by them. I want to give you an example from English that might illustrate the point here. So I’ve got a six year old daughter, a five year old son, and a two year old son. How many infants would you say that I have? I would say I have none. My two year old might disagree. But according to the code of Canon law, I have three because in a bit that’s a little bit surprising for English readers, an infant canonically is anyone under the age of seven. So a canonist and I might both use the word infant, but we mean radically different things by it. Well, something similar is true back then, and it leads to a lot of confusion when you read ancient authors.
It was confusing even between ancient authors. For example, Livi refers to Hannibal as a sinex, as an old man. That’s the final stage of life before death. And Hannibal’s only 44 years old. Meanwhile, Cicero refers to himself at that age as an adolescent. Now look, as a 41 year old, some days I side with Livy and some days I side with Cicero. Well, once you know that authors are using the same words in these radically different ways, it should be easy to see where Irinaeus makes an innocent mistake. It’s often difficult to tell between ancient authors what they mean by a term like juvenile or old man. In fact, we find this problem even in modern translation of Irinaeus himself. As Chapman points out, Irinaeus talks about being a listener of polycarp back when he was of age. In Greek, it’s Heilikia. And modern authors often translate that to mean that he was a teenager back then.
The Roberts translation that I usually use translates it as happening during Ireneus’ early youth. But that’s not what Iranius means. For him, Helekia referred to a man in his 30s. So that’s where the confusion is coming in. Iraneus is doing the same thing to Papias that modern translators do to him. In other words, he’s reading Papias’s argument that Jesus lives into full maturity, all the stages of full human life. And Eraneus applies to that the different ages that he would use to separate those stages of life. And he even makes it pretty clear that what he’s doing. For example, at one point he says, now that the first stage of early life embraces 30 years and that this extends outwards to the 40th year, everyone will admit. But no, that’s Ironeus’s error right there. Not everyone does admit that the transition from youth to maturity happens in one’s 30s.
Most other authors put those stages much earlier. So where does that leave us? Remember, Erneus’ case for Jesus being in his 40s was built upon two things. A tradition seemingly from Papius that Jesus lived through every stage of human life. And from the gospel of John, where we hear that Jesus is not yet 50. I think most of us would agree that Uranius has probably misread both Papias and scripture, but I don’t think that that is a particularly strong argument against either tradition or scripture or indeed Iranaeus himself since Ironeus’s interpretations, even when they’re mistaken here, were at least sensible and plausible readings. If anything, I think the takeaway here should probably be something like the ancients really should have settled upon the meaning of terms like juvenile and adolescent and old man and spared each other and us a lot of confusion. So I think it’s unfortunate that this confusion and basically translation has marred the reputation of Saint Irenaeus because he’s genuinely a brilliant theologian and a wonderful witness to what the early Christians actually believed.
All right. Well, listen, if you enjoy deep dives like this on topics other people don’t cover because they’re too niche, I invite you to consider supporting me over at shamelessjoe.com. It means a lot. And frankly, it gives me the latitude to ignore Mike and pursue unpopular topics when I want to. And finally, you should know this. As early as Ireneus is, there’s actually another church father from a generation before him that I really hope you’ll get to know, Saint Ignatius of Antioch. So I want to share with you here what Ignatius, a disciple of John, had to say and why reading him turns a lot of Protestants Catholic. For Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.